The Hypnotist's Love Story (51 page)

“El-
len
!”

It was Patrick, shouting from the second floor.

“Goodness, is he all right?” said Ellen’s mother, startled.

“I expect he needs your help working things out with Jack,” said Maureen to Ellen. “A woman’s touch, you know.” She gave Anne a “You know what I mean” smile, which was totally lost on Anne.

Ellen dried her hands briskly on a tea towel, bustling a little for Anne’s benefit, because she knew it would bug her to see her behaving so housewifely, and hurried upstairs to Jack’s room. Patrick and Jack were sitting on the floor, their backs up against Jack’s single bed with its Ben 10 bedspread, their hands dangling between their propped-up knees, not looking at each other.

“Can you explain to this stubborn kid why Saskia can’t break into our house in the middle of the night,” said Patrick to Ellen when he saw her standing at the doorway. He mouthed silently,
Help!

“I’m not
stupid
, Dad,” said Jack hotly. “I know she shouldn’t have done that.”

“Right, good then, so what’s the problem?” said Patrick. “Why are you so mad with
me
?”

Ellen went and sat on the floor next to them. She looked at Jack’s skinny, vulnerable little legs in tracksuit pants stuck out in front of him.

She said, “How did you feel when your dad and Saskia broke up, Jack?”

Jack and Patrick both went very still, as if she’d brought up something deeply shameful. For heaven’s sake, thought Ellen. She felt filled with
feistiness. Everything might as well be out in the open now! There would be no more pussyfooting around the subject of Saskia.

“Well, that’s not—” began Patrick.

“I’d like to know,” said Ellen.
You asked for my help, buddy
.

“I don’t really remember,” said Jack. “I was really little, like,
five
.” He gazed ahead, looking back over the vast expanse of time that separated five from eight.

“That’s right, you were very little.” Patrick gave Ellen a triumphant look. “So, the point is—”

“Oh yeah, I remember one thing,” interrupted Jack. “I thought it had to do with her lucky marble.”

Patrick’s face changed. “What?”

Jack banged his knuckles against the cast on his arm.

“Her lucky marble?” asked Ellen.

Patrick answered her, his eyes on Jack as he spoke. “She had this big, colorful marble that belonged to her father, and she held it in the palm of her hand whenever she was nervous about something. She gave it to Jack when he started school.” He paused and cleared his throat. “She said to carry it in his pocket, and the marble would give him magic powers.”

“It wasn’t a weapon,” clarified Jack. He looked up at Ellen. “It didn’t transform into a laser gun or anything like that. It didn’t really do anything at all, actually.”

“I took Saskia’s lucky marble with me when I saw my first ever Scott Surveys client,” said Patrick. “I held it while I waited in reception.”

He’d never before referred to a nice memory involving Saskia. It was Ellen’s first glimpse of the other side of their story.

“I lost the marble at school,” said Jack. “I looked and looked, and a teacher tried to help me, but we couldn’t find it. I didn’t want to tell Saskia because I knew she’d be sad, and then the next day she was gone. So I thought, Uh-oh, she found out I lost it.”

Patrick’s eyes met Ellen’s over the top of Jack’s head.

“You thought it was your fault,” said Ellen to Jack.

“I thought she must have been so mad at me,” said Jack. “And I thought Dad was mad at me for making her go, and that’s why we couldn’t talk about her.”

“Oh, mate.” Patrick pressed two fingers to his forehead. “You didn’t.”

“Yeah, I did,” said Jack cheerfully.

“But it was absolutely nothing to do with you!” Patrick’s eyes were glistening. He went to put his arm around Jack’s shoulders. “Mate, Saskia loved you! She would have done anything for you! She—”

Jack shrugged his father’s arm away. “Take a chill pill, Dad. I know it wasn’t my fault. You and Saskia broke up, like Ethan’s parents did. I was telling you what I thought when I was a dumb little kid.” He yawned. “Anyway, I might go look at my
Guinness World Records
book again.”

“We haven’t finished talking!” protested Patrick.

Jack rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”

“I just want to make sure you understand—”

“You don’t have to be so mean about her.” Jack went to fold his arms and then realized he couldn’t because of his cast. “That’s all I want to say. You act like she’s an actual murderer of actual people! She didn’t break my arm on purpose. It was an accident.”

“Yeah,” said Patrick tiredly. “I know, mate, you’re right, but it’s complicated—”

“Hey, guys.” Patrick’s brother appeared at Jack’s doorway. “I’ve got to get going. Meeting some friends.”

Jack took Simon’s arrival as his opportunity to escape back downstairs. “See ya!” he said, giving his uncle a high five on the way out.

“You two look totally trashed.” Simon shook his head in wonder before heading back downstairs.

“Thanks so much,” Ellen called after him.

Patrick stood up and gave his hand to Ellen to haul her up.

She grunted. “
Ooof
. I
feel
trashed.”

Patrick pulled her to him and she rested her head against his chest for a moment. Her head swirled.
Poor little Jack thinking it was his fault. Poor Saskia losing her lucky marble. Poor David being dumped by Mum for being boring. Poor me, because Patrick doesn’t really love me and I’m having a teeny-tiny baby and oh my God in heaven my breasts hurt.

“
Everything is going to be fine,” said Patrick quietly in her ear.

“Is it?” she said.

When they got downstairs they found Anne had given up on her halfhearted attempt to help Patrick’s mother and was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of wine while Maureen kept packing the dishwasher.

“Well, I have to dash,” she said when she saw Ellen. “Pip and Mel and I are meeting up for a drink. There’s a new wine bar in the city we’ve been meaning to try.”

“You’re going into the city
now
?” Maureen looked at the clock on Ellen’s kitchen wall. It was eight p.m. “Goodness.”

“Oh, we three are night owls!” said Anne.

It was like her interlude with Ellen’s father had never happened. His appearance hadn’t been a giant upheaval in Ellen’s life at all, just an odd little ripple.

Anne ended up leaving together with Simon, who coincidentally was meeting friends at a club on the same street as Anne’s wine bar, and was thrilled to save on cab money into the city. “Well, that’s just
so
nice of you, Anne,” said Maureen unhappily.

After Ellen and Maureen had finished clearing up the kitchen (Ellen’s kitchen cabinets hadn’t been so sparkling clean since before her grandmother had died), Patrick’s father suggested a game of Monopoly. He’d spotted the box sitting on Ellen’s grandmother’s shelf and was rubbing his hands and promising to bankrupt them all within the hour.

While George was setting up the board, carefully stacking banknotes into neat piles, Patrick asked if he and Ellen could be excused from the game.

“We might take a quick walk on the beach,” he said, raising his eyebrows questioningly at Ellen. She nodded. Maybe that would clear her head.

“It’s a cold, windy night in the middle of winter and in the middle of the night!” protested Maureen. “And your wife is pregnant!”

“It’s spring and it’s half past eight,” said Patrick. “It’s quite balmy and I don’t think the baby will mind.”

“And I’m not his wife,” said Ellen.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Yet!” she amended hastily. “I mean, obviously, I will be.”

“Off you go then.” Maureen gave Patrick and Ellen a swift, searching look, a specialist appraising their relationship for hairline cracks that might cause trouble. Then she rearranged her face and said, “After you come back, George and I might duck out for a game of tennis in the moonlight.”

“Ooh, my wife is so sarcastic!” said George. “Here, darling, I’ve got the iron for you.” He held up the miniature iron from the Monopoly set.

“You know perfectly well I always have the battleship.” Maureen sat down at the head of the table and rattled the dice in her cupped hands. “Come on, Jack! Don’t think I’m going easy on you because of one broken bone!”

Patrick was right. The wind had dropped and it felt good to walk out onto the deserted beach in their jackets and scarves. The sand was still orange from the dust, but the salty cold air seemed dust-free, and they both took big, bracing breaths before tramping straight down toward the hard sand close to the water.

They walked side by side without touching. Ellen concentrated on the rhythmic hollow sound of the waves crashing on the beach and her own breathing.

“So,” said Patrick finally.

“So.”

“So that threw me for a six.”

“Jack.”

“Yes. I mean, I thought the fact that he never asked for Saskia was a good
thing! It
never
occurred to me that he blamed himself for her leaving.” His voice cracked. “Poor little tacker.”

Ellen had noticed that in times of stress Patrick spoke more like his father: the language of Australia in the 1950s.

“Children think they’re the center of the universe,” said Ellen. “That’s why they blame themselves.”

“I think,” said Patrick, “that he’s been angry with me about Saskia for years.”

“It’s possible.” Ellen stopped herself from saying anything more. He needed to work this out for himself.

They walked in silence for a few minutes and then Patrick said quietly, “She
was
a good mother to him. She…”

His words drifted away, and he looked up to the stars as if for inspiration. Then he took a deep breath and began to speak quickly, without looking at her, as if they were secret agents who had met on a beach and he only had limited time to brief her on this urgent information.

“When Colleen died I didn’t cope very well. I’d never felt that sort of pain before, it scared the crap out of me. I thought, What’s this? This hurts! So my brilliant strategy was to resist it. I remember thinking,
I’m
not going through that seven stages of grieving bullshit. If it hurts to think about her, then don’t. Get busy. That’s why I started the business. I thought if I tried hard enough, if I was mentally strong enough, I could avoid the pain. So that worked out really well, as you can imagine. I was a walking, talking, breathing robot. But people thought I was coping great. They complimented me. And it was sort of true. I was coping. And then I met Saskia at that conference, and you know, I liked her; I probably even loved her, in my weird, robotic way. But she didn’t seem to notice I was a robot! We’d be doing stuff, and she’d be smiling at me, and every now and then I’d think, in a sort of surprised way, she’s really happy, she’s not putting it on, she’s genuinely happy. And I thought, Well, it doesn’t matter, because this is who I am now, and Jack’s happy— Watch your feet there.”

A wave had broken farther in than the others and white, foamy water
rushed toward them. Patrick used one arm to lift Ellen briefly in the air, saving her shoes, before depositing her back onto the dry sand. The sudden unexpected warmth of his body filled Ellen with a strange yearning for him, as if they weren’t in a relationship, as if she was taking a walk with a nonavailable man who was just a friend.

“Saskia took on so much of the parenting,” said Patrick. “I blame Colleen for that.”

“Pardon?” said Ellen, confused, but somewhat happy to hear poor Colleen blamed for anything.

“Colleen was a great mother, but she was very much, This is
my
territory. She was so condescending whenever I tried to help with Jack, as if I was an adorable buffoon, as if he wasn’t really completely safe with me. So when she died, I was terrified, thinking, I can’t bring up this kid on my own! I’ll dress him the wrong way, he’ll be too cold or too hot, and I won’t feed him right or buy the right nappy cream or whatever. I had no idea, and my mother and Colleen’s mother were over all the time, taking care of him, and of course they were even worse than Colleen, as if no man was capable of changing a nappy. And then I met Saskia, and she seemed so happy to step right into Colleen’s place, to take on the Mummy role, and I let her do that. I just sat back and let it happen. Jack loved her, and she loved him. I shouldn’t have done that.” He glanced over at Ellen. “Although, I don’t know, maybe I’m doing it again with you, letting you make Jack’s lunches.”

“I like making his lunches,” said Ellen carefully. She could feel the presence of all those other women in Jack’s life—the grandmothers, Colleen, Saskia—gathered around her, shaking their heads at Patrick and tutting, all thinking the same thing: You’d feed him
white bread
sandwiches!

“Well,” said Patrick. “I guess I’m trying to find a better balance this time. Not just handing over my son and saying, Here, you look after him. And when our new little baby is born, I want to be involved, right? From the beginning.”

“You’ve got more experience with babies than me,” said Ellen.

Patrick shot her a grateful smile. “That’s right. I’ll be the expert. I’ll train you up, darlin’, tell you what’s what.”

“So, you stopped being a robot?” said Ellen. “Is that why you broke up with Saskia?”
And are you still a robot? Am I just another Saskia?

“
One day, I started crying,” said Patrick. “In the car. It was the strangest thing. I cried all the way from Gordon to Mascot. And it kept happening. Each time I was alone in the car, I started crying. Sometimes I caught people staring at me at traffic lights. This grown man sobbing away at the steering wheel. It went on for weeks. And then one morning I woke up and I felt different. Like when you’ve been really sick and you wake up and you realize you’re better. It wasn’t that I felt happy so much, I just felt as if maybe happiness was possible. And I looked at Saskia lying next to me, and I knew that I had to break up with her, that it was absolutely the right thing to do, that it needed to be just Jack and me for a while. It was just so blindingly clear to me. But she’d only just found out that her mother was sick, so I kept putting it off.”